RPGs: the competition
[This entry was originally written on 12/31/06 but I thought it was coming off half-baked. Now that I look at it, I think it's reasonably coherent. Whether it actually says something of value is another question...]

Over on theRPGsite, I've been stimulated into two hypotheses:

1. Here and here I argued that "alternative RPGs" which challenge the standards of traditional design run the risk of failing to differentiate themselves enough from board games.

2. here I argued that the basic "explore a dungeon, fight monsters, get loot" scenario is one of the best formats for introducing people to roleplaying, precisely because it offers relatively clear procedures & goals, just a few steps removed from a boardgame.

There seems to be a contradiction. But in this post I resolve it as follows: even though the standard dungeon or mission-based scenario--stripped of deep character issues, thematic content, or even narrative context--is virtually a boardgame (actually very similar to a "refereed" wargame), the skeletal or "inside-out" nature of traditional games (design for cause, presenting tools without dictating or circumscribing their use) lures the participants into more and more involved application, and broader and broader application, of the fundamental procedures. That is: play a few dungeoncrawls, and then you realize nearly without prompting that the activity you're engaged in can be extended and built on with layers of context.

Contrast this with the "focused" style of design, which has become particularly popular in some circles these days. With these games, you have a core scenario and mechanics which have been carefully honed (one hopes) for that scenario: like a module or adventure that comes with exactly the rules and only the rules needed to play that module. However, the constraints imposed by the rules often come from "outside", more or less circumscribing the type of scenario allowed in the game.

Where the unfocused style of design allows a group to develop its own idiom of play through socialization (and to absorb new members in roughly the manner that social groups do, that is, through a period of adjustment and "learning the local language"), focused design often has the goal of standardizing play across groups, allowing interchangeability, but at a cost of "startup brittleness" and long-term rigidity. By "startup brittleness" I mean simply that a group which attempts a given game runs a fairly high risk of simply failing to find a way to play it in a manner that all the members enjoy--unless/until the group trains itself in games of a particular "type", and expels members who do not enjoy that "type". By "long-term rigidity" I mean that a game continues to be played in the same manner by the group (in theory this allows instant assimilation of new members who "grok" the type of play which is standardized in that game). The cost, though, is that the group can't evolve their local "idiom" within the game. A change of focus requires a different game.

Conceptual linkage: Brand Robins on genre theory, Jonathan Walton on Communities of Practice, JimBobOz (Kyle Shuant) on getting and keeping a group (this link will do), Chris Lehrich on how D&D and other early RPGs developed through "bricolage" (tinkering) with concepts, instead of engineering them. (Ironically JimBob has nothing but bile for Chris's writings.)